raising a child in asia's world city

There are many kinds of parents.

I grew up with one who chose to learn from every mistake she made. Which sounds lovely until you understand the mechanism. The mechanism is that somebody had to be the mistake.

Parents, a note. This trick only works if you have three kids born two to three years apart. Choose wisely.

I am joking. Mostly. A child's education is not something to toy with, and yet toying with it is exactly what the system quietly asks of families who arrive without a map. You try something with the first one. You watch what breaks. You adjust for the second. By the third you have finally worked out how Hong Kong schooling actually functions, and the first one is already sixteen and it is late.

Nobody consented to being the pilot programme. That is the part that stays with me.

Now add the variables

Picture a parent from a lower income household. Fine, this happens everywhere.

Now make them non-ethnic Chinese. Now make them an introvert, because the entire informal support system in this city runs on being confident enough to ask a stranger a question in a language you do not speak.

Now, for fun, make them a single parent.

How do you build a successful childhood in Asia's World City from there?

Some of you are already thinking, Karndeep, you are cherry picking the worst case. First, this is not the worst case, not close. Second, before I answer, I want to shake your hand. Because if you are arguing with me about how extreme the scenario is, we have already agreed that the scenario exists. That is the whole ballgame. Everything after that is a conversation about how we fix it.

I write because I am young and full of thoughts, some of which have not been properly structured yet. This is me structuring them out loud.

What the system actually offers

Let me be fair before I am critical, because the framework does exist and pretending otherwise helps nobody.

The EDB has run the Chinese Language Curriculum Second Language Learning Framework since the 2014/15 school year. The so called designated schools system was abolished back in 2013/14 specifically so that NCS children would not be concentrated in a handful of campuses and would instead sit inside an immersive Chinese environment. Today around 70 per cent of kindergartens under the Kindergarten Education Scheme and over 70 per cent of primary and secondary schools admit NCS students. Schools with only a handful of NCS students, meaning one to nine, can apply for additional funding on a need basis for after school support. There are online self learning resources, a summer bridging programme and after school Chinese courses for lower primary on a trial basis.

There are also alternative qualifications. GCE, GCSE, IGCSE and Applied Learning Chinese, pegged at Qualifications Framework Level 1 to 3, all accepted by JUPAS institutions for the Chinese requirement.

So the scaffolding is there. Read on paper, it looks like a serious answer.

Here is what it looks like from a kitchen table.

The gap is not policy. It is information.

The EDB translates its leaflets. Urdu, Nepali, Tagalog, Hindi, Thai, Vietnamese. Good.

But nobody chooses a school from a leaflet.

School choice in Hong Kong runs on information that moves through parent networks.

That information circulates in Cantonese, in WhatsApp groups, at the school gate, between parents who already know each other. If you cannot join that conversation you are not slightly behind. You are operating on a different information system entirely, and no amount of translated PDF fixes that.

This is why I keep saying, involve yourself in the school meetings. Go even when you understand a third of it. Go and be the person in the room who asks the obvious question, because the obvious question has usually never been asked out loud and half the Chinese parents wanted to ask it too.

Understand the system yourself, because nobody is going to explain it to you properly. Not out of malice. Because most of the people you will ask do not understand it either.

Start earlier than you think you need to

If your child is under six, that is your window and it will not open again in the same way.

A language has to live in a day. Not in an appointment. This is the single thing I would put above everything else in this piece.

You will probably not be able to teach them Cantonese yourself. That is fine. You do not need to. What you need to do is make sure Cantonese is in the house every single day, and the cheapest way to do that is the screen. Cantonese dubbed cartoons. Cantonese shows. Local kids programming. Put it on. Keep putting it on. Yes, force them a bit.

Your child will absorb tone, rhythm and pronunciation from that in a way that no worksheet will ever deliver and they will do it at an age where it costs them nothing. The same acquisition at fourteen is expensive, slow and humiliating, and by then they have also learned to be embarrassed.

Then find them Cantonese speaking friends and protect that friendship like it is a subject. Peer contact does more than any programme. Kids will teach each other the language they actually need, which is not the language in the textbook.

Choose the kindergarten with the immersive environment even if it is less comfortable, even if fewer families look like yours, even if the commute is worse. I know this is a hard thing to ask of a parent who is already stretched. I am asking anyway, because it is the highest leverage decision you will make and it happens before anyone tells you it matters.

What I would not do

I would not rely on the classes run at these help centres.

I want to be careful here because some of these are run by people who genuinely care and are working with what they were given. But look at the shape of the thing. Ninety minutes. On a Sunday. Eight sessions and then it ends.

Eight Sundays.

What is a child supposed to carry out of that? You cannot acquire a language in twelve hours spread across two months with no continuity, no assessment, no progression and often no qualified teacher. That is not language learning. That is attendance.

And attendance is exactly what it is designed to produce, because attendance is what gets reported to the funder. Twelve hours per child, forty children, four hundred and eighty contact hours delivered. It reads beautifully in a report. It teaches nobody Cantonese.

If you are going to spend your Sundays on something, spend them on something that runs for years.

The qualification trap

This one nobody warns parents about early enough, so let me.

The alternative qualifications work. GCSE Chinese, IGCSE, ApL(C). They will satisfy the JUPAS Chinese requirement and get your child through a university door. That is real and it matters.

But understand what you are trading. ApL(C) sits at Qualifications Framework Level 1 to 3. It is a lower bar than the HKDSE Chinese paper, and the reason it exists is that the DSE paper was designed for native speakers and is, for most NCS students, unreachable.

So the door opens onto one room. Your child gets into university. Then they apply for a job that requires written Chinese at a working standard and they discover that the qualification which unlocked their degree does not unlock the office.

If a school suggests moving your child onto the alternative track at Primary 4, ask why, ask what the ceiling is and ask what would need to be true for them to stay on the mainstream paper. Sometimes the answer is genuinely in your child's interest. Sometimes it is in the school's.

To the teachers

Second section, and I will be blunt.

There are teachers advising NCS students who have never been trained to do it, who cannot give useful guidance for two reasons. One, they have not lived our lives. Two, they consider it beyond their pay grade.

I will grant the first one properly, because it is not really a criticism. You cannot expect a teacher to have lived a life they have not lived. What you can expect is that they know they have not lived it and adjust.

I will also grant something structural. A Chinese Language teacher in Hong Kong is trained to teach Chinese to native speakers. Teaching Chinese as a second language is a genuinely different discipline with different methods and most teachers were never given that training. That is a system failure being paid for by individual teachers, and I am not interested in blaming people for a gap they did not create.

But the second reason is the one I will not let go of.

My question to educators in Hong Kong is simple. Why become a teacher if you are not willing to be a mentor to every child in the room?

I am not asking you to be a genie. I am not asking you to fix a family's finances or fill in for a parent. I am asking for something much smaller and much harder, which is that you understand that for a child whose parents cannot read the school letter, you are the entire interface between that child and their future. There is nobody behind you. When you decide a student is not university material at thirteen, that is not an assessment. That is a life trajectory, delivered casually, by someone who will not be there to see the result.

Some of you already know this and carry it.

To the organisations

Third section.

Stop running the eight session special course. You know it does not work. You run it because it fits a funding cycle, not because it fits a child.

If you are going to teach Chinese, teach Chinese. That means a structured curriculum aligned to the Second Language Learning Framework so that what you teach connects to what happens in the classroom on Monday. It means a qualified teacher, not a well meaning volunteer with a worksheet pack. It means progression across years, not a certificate in December. And it means it should be vetted.

I want EDB vetting for NGO run Chinese programmes. Not to bury small organisations in paperwork, but because I sat in one of these classrooms and I would have wanted somebody to have checked that the content was sound and the teacher was appropriate. Parents assume that check has happened. It has not. There is no mechanism by which it could have.

If your organisation cannot commit to multi year structured teaching, that is an honest position, and the honest thing to do is say so and refer families to someone who can, rather than run twelve hours and photograph the certificate ceremony.

We are only now seeing born and raised non-ethnic Chinese residents becoming social workers and going back into these communities to guide parents. That is the most promising development in this space and it is being squeezed, because it sits under large NGO umbrellas where the funding for it barely exists. Nobody has worked out how to fund the thing that works.

If you are planning to run something like this, or you are already trying, please reach out. I will advise for free, or I will build it with you, email me @ [email protected].

One programme I will mention by name is Project Gemstone, run by the police in Yau Tsim District. It offers free weekly Chinese classes with a qualified teacher, plus mentoring, and it has been running since 2013. Two things to be clear about. It is aimed at young people roughly sixteen to twenty five, not young children. And it is explicitly a pipeline towards the disciplined services and the civil service. If that is your child's direction it is one of the few things in this city with actual continuity behind it, and continuity is the whole point. If it is not their direction, the lesson to take from it is the structure, not the destination.

What I actually want

I do not think any of this requires a revolution.

Fund one thing that runs for five years instead of five things that run for eight Sundays. Put the support at kindergarten where it compounds instead of at Primary 4 where it remediates. Train Chinese teachers in second language pedagogy and pay for that training. Vet the programmes that families are trusting with their children. Tell parents the truth about the qualification ceiling at the start rather than at the end. And build parent information into the networks parents actually use rather than into leaflets nobody reads.

None of that is expensive compared to what we currently spend achieving very little.

My mother worked it out eventually. She worked it out by trial, error and three children and she should not have had to. There is a version of this city where a parent arriving with nothing is handed the map on day one, and it is not a more expensive city. It is just one that decided to.

Asia's World City. Let us act like it.